Inside IBM Systems Director VMControl

By:
Greg Hintermeister

Have you ever bought or built something to simplify your life only to discover that it brings a whole set of additional complications to worry about? I have. Take my walkout garden. I built a creek, pond, and a fire pit. I love them! When I’m enjoying them my life seems so simple. However, the upkeep, maintenance, and monitoring of my kids around them add quite a bit of stress. Turns out, a pond with flowing water is a greater kid magnet than ice cream!

It seems our industry has done the same thing with virtualization technologies. We wanted to simplify your life by letting you use one physical server to run multiple workloads, but in the process, we added a lot of complexity and stress in order to keep it managed. Even worse, the way virtualization is implemented on various platforms is different and requires unique skills. Managing those different implementations can be even more difficult because, while you may be an expert in IBM i virtualization, you may not be as well versed in VMware or z/VM virtualization.

Enter IBM Systems Director VMControl

In a nutshell, IBM Systems Director VMControl provides enhanced virtualization management across the platforms in your data center and provides simplified deployment of ready-to-use workloads across those systems.

As an IBM i administrator, you already manage your partitions (virtual servers). IBM Systems Director VMControl lets you easily create, edit, and monitor those virtual servers, as well as the guest IBM i operating systems running in those virtual servers. Additionally, since many of you are responsible for a mix of IBM i, AIX, and Linux workloads, now you can manage all your virtualized Power Systems resources in one place. Further, I have talked with many of you who have responsibilities for VMware or Linux on z workloads, or minimally have the responsibility to report status and utilization of all virtualized servers. Well, IBM Systems Director VMControl handles enhanced virtualization management of those platforms as well.

IBM Systems Director VMControl provides deployment of virtual appliances as well, which allow you to simplify deployment of AIX workloads onto your Power System, and if you have z/VM, deploy Linux on z workloads.

Let us dig into the details of what IBM Systems Director VMControl (Figure 1) provides.

IBM Systems Director -- A Reminder

Since IBM Systems Director VMControl is a plug-in to IBM Systems Director, I wanted to remind you that the base IBM Systems Director is available at no additional charge from IBM online (see below for link) and has been available since October 2008. IBM Systems Director has a web-based user interface so there is nothing you need to install on your workstation in order to use it. IBM Systems Director comes with many out-of-the-box plug-ins that help you manage the IBM systems in your data center including Status Manager, Automation Manager, Update Manager, among others. Optional plug-ins are available and can be found on our web site (see below). For Power Systems users, it is important to note that the management server can be installed on AIX, Linux on Power, and Windows, but not IBM i; however, the IBM Systems Director can manage IBM i very well and the agent is shipped with the operating system.

Enhanced Virtualization Management

While your Power System virtualization can be managed directly through the HMC, there are some features you may find in IBM Systems Director VMControl that earn the ‘enhanced virtualization management’ label. Here are some capabilities that describe what you can do.

You can open IBM Systems Director and view “Virtual Servers and Hosts” (Figure 2). It shows all of your Power Systems, your IBM i virtual servers, in addition to your AIX virtual servers and your colleagues’ VMware hosts and virtual servers. Real-time metrics are shown in columns and they show how much of the physical server processing is being utilized as well as utilization of what has been allocated to each virtual server. Allocated processors and memory values are also shown, which make it easy to see which host is not fully utilized.

You can add more workloads to a Power System host by right-clicking and selecting “Create Virtual Server”, which allows you to create an empty virtual server and have it all ready to install your IBM i OS. All of the guest operating systems can be monitored with an IBM Systems Director agent, which gives you peace of mind knowing that if any operating system exceeds the threshold, you will be notified. Finally, the ability to relocate either from the UI, command line, or through automation plans is supported for Power Systems, VMware, and Xen. This lets you monitor hardware or operating systems, then based on a trigger, relocate a running virtual server from one physical server to another. The Relocate task uses the mobility feature in Power Systems for AIX/Linux virtual server relocation and VMotion in VMware’s Virtual Center for ESX virtual server relocation.

For your z/VM needs, the complete lifecycle is now available. New capabilities include a “Deploy” wizard that lets you deploy an empty virtual server. While optimized for the deployment of complete virtual appliances (next section), we heard from customers that there are times that an empty virtual server is needed that has more complex configuration. This ‘deploy empty virtual server’ option lets you customize the kind of virtual server you want on z/VM before you install a Linux for z operating system. Or, if you prefer, you can take our defaults then edit the virtual server later--or delete it when you are done.

All of this enhanced virtualization management provided by IBM Systems Director VMControl is available at no additional charge.

Simplified Deployment of Ready-to-use Workloads

In providing the enhanced virtualization management, you told us that an administrator’s goal is to use virtualization to simplify their management of the datacenter, not manage virtualization directly. Creating a virtual serer is not really anyone’s goal. The goal is to get running workloads deployed as fast as possible. That is what the Image Manager piece of IBM Systems Director VMControl does. With a 60 day evaluation period, IBM Systems Director VMControl Image Manager lets you create a library of deployable workloads (we call them virtual appliances) and then provides the ability to deploy them to your systems (Figure 2 and Figure 3). Additionally you can capture your existing workloads and save them as virtual appliances in your library. What is a virtual appliance? It’s a package that contains a virtual server definition that meets the requirements to run its associated image, where the image contains the operating system and any software installed onto it. Since many virtual appliances contain already tested and proven environments, it becomes much faster to deploy a virtual appliance to a host, let IBM Systems Director VMControl create the virtual server and set up the image, and when done, your new guest OS is running and ready to use!

Practically, your virtual appliance library may be empty when you first install IBM Systems Director VMControl. I suggest you capture a running virtual server you need often to see the value of this new function. For example, let’s say you have your IBM i servers along with three AIX virtual servers on your system. Using IBM Systems Director VMControl you can select the AIX virtual server you know is at the proper levels and has the right software on it, then click “Capture”. It will capture the entire operating system and all running applications as one encapsulated virtual appliance (Figure 4). It will also capture the virtual server details that it is running in. All of that data is then stored inside a single virtual appliance in your library so you can quickly access it and deploy it in the future. The virtual appliance is stored in your NIM server as a mksysb file, along with additional metadata for the virtual server definition. Note: If you do not have NIM in your Power System environment, check out the links below.

Since this function is cross-platform, you can take your skills and apply them in new areas of your datacenter. Capturing a z/VM virtual server running Linux on z is a similar experience, and will end up in the same virtual appliance library. Deploying a virtual appliance is very similar regardless of the platform. In fact when a virtual appliance is selected, we will filter and show only the hosts that are capable of running it. This means that you can start managing the needs of your business by the workload you want to deploy and run, not by what hardware platform specifics. You could even name and describe the virtual appliance by what applications or services it provides, rather than operating system and platform requirements.

If you choose to not purchase the IBM Systems Director VMControl license, you still have full access to the enhanced virtualization management tasks. Any virtual appliances you created will still be there, but you will not be able to deploy them or capture new virtual appliances until you purchase an Image Manager license.

I hope you take some time to explore IBM Systems Director VMControl. You get 60 days to evaluate the image manager piece and even if you do not purchase it, the enhanced virtualization capabilities will provide you with much better tools to manage your IBM i virtual environment, as well as your other virtualization environments. For more information, look at the following links.



Greg Hintermeister (gregh@us.ibm.com) works at IBM as a user experience designer and is an IBM master inventor. He has extensive experience designing user interaction for IBM Systems Director, IBM Virtualization Manager, System i Navigator, mobile applications, and numerous web applications. Greg is a regular speaker at user groups and technical conferences.

Bookmark/Search this post with:
  • Delicious
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Yahoo

ProVIP Sponsors

ProVIP Sponsors